ELECTRONOMICON

Happy Birthday, Kids!

Happy Solstice, Folks!

Below is an image that I created back in 2005 :


































We've been getting a lot of that, lately.

Both the house and the garage were painted before the first snow fell this year. The garage
was painted with several coats of elastomeric paint, for extra protection.

Happy Birthday, Kids!

The twins and I visited the crater today. Beautiful weather for it, too.

In the photo above :

Gage Nikkal Caigan to the left,  and Tuli Viatrix Caigan on the right.

Dan writes : Even if the calculation of the planetary hours is a technique requiring some calculation, doesn't that pale in comparison with the requirements to draw up an astrological chart for a given time and place?

Khem responds : Ever hear that old chestnut, "The life so short; the craft so long to learn" ?

Asking any craftsperson or artist if what they do is difficult is to miss the point altogether.

Of course it is difficult - the point is that it satisfies the soul.

I also suggest that you try asking some of the astrologers at a SCA tournament how they cast their charts all day long - like as not, they'll tell you that it's all about the training and the tables.

As James Evans writes in his History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, "The tedium involved in a strict calculation can be reduced with the aid of planetary tables."

A handful of astrologers still employ astrolabes or some other tool for taking a sight, for the same reason that some navigators still use a sextant (or even an astrolabe) instead of GPS - pride of craft.

Here is an example of what I mean :

The Tools of the Trade:
An Astronomer's Notebook
http://tinyurl.com/63smsj

And here is a link to an article about a table with some stone markers that could be moved around on it to cast horoscopes for clients that was used by itinerant astrologers working the streets many centuries ago :

James Evans - The astrologer's apparatus: a picture of professional practice in Greco-Roman Egypt
in : Journal for the History of Astronomy, Vol. 35, Part 1, No. 118, pages 1 - 44, 2004.
http://tinyurl.com/58g3oz

Note the resemblance to the game of Astrological Chess described by Alfonso X in his Liber Acedrex :

http://tinyurl.com/6m5hxo

And here is a link to a page that has a better diagram of such a table :

Medieval Cosmology
http://tinyurl.com/6ptdna

Anyway, to return to your question :

The same procedures that generate the planetary hours for a given day of the year and for a given degree of latitude also provide a way to slice the local horizon into Houses.

I am having a lot of trouble with Dan Harms' blogware - for some reason, my responses to his posts keep getting discarded.

So I am going to continue posting my remarks on his essays here, and hope that his comments are better received on LiveJournal.

All interested parties can see the original post here :

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, Part 6
http://tinyurl.com/67txxx

Dan Harms writes :

" The planetary hours are a sort of poor man's astrology, perhaps conceived of as an early effort to integrate planetary influences into magic practiced by people with no astrological training themselves.

The idea is pretty simple; each day and night is divided into twelve hours each, and each hour is attributed to a particular planet. The first hour of each day is attributed to the planet, or the corresponding deity, for which the day is named. "

The author of the *Mystical Kabbalah* argues that the planets do not necessarily appear anywhere in the local sky during their respective planetary hours.

Although he may feel that this is a legitimate grievance against the system of the planetary hours, and although this same argument turns up again and again in the writings of practitioners and scholars of magic ( perhaps with no astrological training themselves(?)), the argument is a 'red herring' that has nothing whatsoever to do with the practice of astrological magic.

Far from being a " poor man's astrology ", the procedure for deriving the planetary hours is a remarkably sophisticated way of dividing the local horizon into astrological Houses at the practitioner's own Latitude and during a given Season, based on the appearance of the Sun upon the horizon in the East, and the amount of time the Sun takes to traverse the local sky and disappear in the West.